If the auction grants exclusive rights, that means other businesses can't develop the spectrum even further. Sure, the consumers get extra gizmos, but it'll be other businesses that are making those gizmos to sell.
Still, it does suggest a shift away from monopoly business practices and more towards competitive business practices. I did read that Republican money-raising efforts are floundering, so perhaps it's a way to either shake down the AT&Ts of the world, or get money from smaller businesses.
The cellular targets on bacteria are very different than those for mammals. It's uncommon for viriuses to jump species. It's even more rare to jump to another phylum. Jumping kingdoms is practically miraculous.
The FDA has already approved bacteriophages to be used in a variety of settings, so there's probably a pretty good safety record.
A lot of things could contribute to the trends. We're becoming increasingly international, which is odd, mostly because we host some really good general health information. Over the years we've gotten some really odd traffic spikes from Google as they tweak their search algorithms. Even though we only serve the Pacific Northwest, we get lots of overseas traffic.
My coworker remarked today that Linux jumped from 3% to 6% in the weblogs this month. Now, odds are something else is going on, but it's an interesting little statistic. We often ponder our weblog statistics, seeing clear trends in OS's and browsers.
Creates the Consumer Protection Against Computer Spyware Act. Sets forth provisions for unauthorized collection or culling of personally identifiable information, unauthorized access to or modifications of computer settings and computer damage, unauthorized interference with installation or disabling computer software, and other prohibited conduct. Provides that certain persons may bring a civil action against a violator of the Act. Exempts willful and wanton misconduct from the limitation on liability.
This is a cure for death, unless I'm badly mistaken.
Well, it is a cure for death. Of course, all your cells will turn cancerous and you'll need to live in a vat full of nutrients. You'll potentially live forever, though I'm not sure I'd wish that sort of immortality on my worst enemy.
Think of this as an initial proof-of-concept. Fiddling with DNA is extremely useful - correcting genetic diseases and curing all sorts of viruses that hang out in your cells comes to mind (e.g. herpes). You could even look at curing cancer, since that's typically due to genetic mutations that could be potentially removed, making cells non-cancerous again.
Eventually, you'll want to be able to recognize and remove longer strands of DNA. I'd also worry about the efficiency - randomly removing strands of DNA from healthy cells is a good way to cause big problems. Existing gene therapies that use viruses to deliver the payload sometimes go astray and cause cancer, which is no good.
The autism they are dealing with is from hanging 'x' syndrome all you need to do is find a female who is trait positive (has on malformed x) and breed her.
I keep trying to breed with a trait positive female mouse, but after a few drinks all she wants to do is run around on her wheel. What am I doing wrong?
The catch, of course, is that all this animation comes at a pretty huge cost in time. It takes teams of animators countless hours to generate all that animation.
I keep thinking that procedural animation is going to be the next big thing. Instead of rigid animations, we'll see rules governing the position of each limb and how they interact with the world and other characters. It's expensive in terms of CPU processing power, but it allows for a far more natural interaction with the environment. There's a movie of the new Indiana Jones game that shows this off nicely.
My dream, as a hobbyist game developer, is to have animation and text to voice systems get to the point where I can do a lot of the work myself. As it is, coordinating voice actors and model animation takes a huge chunk of time.
Ironically, just a few weeks ago our Google Search Appliance lost two drives in a few days (resulting in a new server being shipped to us after some hassle with customer service). One theory is that the drives don't handle losing power very well (we had a power outage). My guess is that under ideal conditions, the failure rates are about the same. When things go wrong (e.g. hotter than normal, power issues, etc), perhaps the SAS drives have an advantage.
For starters, our SAN uses extremely fast connectivity. It sounds like you're moving your disk I/O over the network, which is a fairly significant bottleneck (even Gb). We also have the flexibility of multiple tiers - 1st tier being expensive, fast disks, and 2nd tier being cheaper IDE drives. I imagine you can fake that a variety of ways, but it's built in. Finally, there's the enclosure itself, with redundant power and such.
Still, I bet you could do what you want on the cheap. Being in health care, response time and availability really are life-and-death, but many other industries don't need to spend the extra. Best of luck.
People talk about the brain being this lovely, elaborate machine. In reality, it's a mass of chemical signals and nerves that were selected over millions of years by evolutionary pressures. Yes, there may be some parts of the brain that trigger pleasurable feelings when giving to others. There's also clearly parts of the brain that trigger pleasurable feelings when taking things from others.
Your mind is really a collection of competing and cooperating neurons and signaling mechanisms. Complex concepts like "altruism" get generated by billions of nerve cells doing their thing. It's a classic example of emergent behavior.
Well, my SSN is in lots of databases, so I don't worry about that too much. It isn't public, though, mostly because various institutions use SSN like a password (which I feel is crazy). The ideal from a "proof of identity" standpoint is to have a public identifier and some mechanism to prove that's who you are. Now, I wouldn't care about the proof aspect for most things. I'd just want a number to check against to see if person X is the same as entry Y. If it's just "John Smith", that's useless.
I wouldn't mind having some unique identifier in some database somewhere. The main risk people mention is that it makes it difficult to "clear your name" (or number in this case) once the government sticks you on a list. Currently, though, the matching is so inaccurate that innocent people end up paying for the crimes of others.
When we bought our house, our escrow company checked several variations of the owner's name. It turns out there was an unusual one and sure enough, there were liens against him from a previous court judgment. Soon ensued a wacky setup where the person selling the house didn't want to formally sell it until he could settle with the previous party (presumably for less money). We ended up living in our house for months without having clear title to the place.
Though we didn't try the guy at all, our escrow guys were great, holding on to the cash necessary to pay off the loan and guaranteeing that we'd get the title by a certain date. When buying a house, most people think the money going to the escrow folks is just for show, but in this case they really earned their keep.
It's funny that it required them to check odd name variations to find out the house wasn't really his to sell. If everyone had unique numbers and judgments and such were recorded under those numbers, it would be far more difficult to hide from your responsibilities.
There's a variety of "no work" databases out there. As a healthcare organization, we're required to check them or else we'll lose our Medicare status. For example, there's one that lists people who have been convicted of fraud. If we employ them, we could lose our Medicare reimbursement.
From a database perspective, the problem is making some automated process to make this work. Most lists I've seen don't have SSN, so you have to do crazy name matches. Of course, people convicted of fraud always use their real name, right?
Putting civil liberties aside, from a straight technical standpoint it would be great if everyone had a unique identifier and people would give lists that have these unique identifiers. I realize people have heart attacks over SSN, but there's nothing else out there at the moment (and it drives me nuts when banks use knowing SSN as proof-of-identity).
I'm not advocating we switch to some "everyone gets a number" society, but it's equally silly to pass laws requiring us to check lists of names and not expect it to be wildly inaccurate.
They got it all wrong. The problem isn't with WiFi, the problem is when the signal carries the kill bit, passing through your body and causing extreme cellular damage. That's why most of the time the studies show up nothing.
Learning the NWN toolset, if you have no programming experience, can be daunting. It sounds like your background is ideally suited to 3D modeling, if that's of interest to you. That being said, if you're interested there are many tutorials to choose from.
Early studies seem to suggest that crime isn't reduced (BBC and NYCLU).
A comprehensive British study, published in 2002, found that the presence of closed circuit television (CCTV) surveillance had little or no effect on crime in public transportation or city centers, and had no effect on violent crimes.3 Researchers examined twenty-two controlled and peer-reviewed scientific studies that analyzed the use of surveillance cameras in British and North-American cities. Of the five studies conducted in American cities, including two in New York City, not one found a reduction in crime attributable to video surveillance.4
In a more recent study, it seemed to help deter crime.
A review (Welsh & Farrington 2006) of high quality evaluations of the effectiveness of CCTV as a crime prevention measure concluded that there was an overall eight percent reduction in crime in the experimental areas where CCTV was installed compared with a nine percent increase in crime in the control areas. The review included evaluations of 19 sites in the UK and the USA. Other findings from this meta-analysis concluded that CCTV interventions were more successful in car parks than in other settings such as city centres or housing estates, and that CCTV interventions were generally more successful in the UK than in the USA.
A year or two ago I participated in Bioware's writing contest, winning the community voting. I actually did it for the swag they were giving away - I use their coffee mug every day and that Bioware wool cap kept me warm all winter. They'd already offered me a job some time ago, mostly after my NWN modules came out. It was extremely flattering, though the move, disruption to my family, and pay cut made the decision pretty easy. I have a great job in healthcare and a somehow find the time to continue to work on my module building even still. Working for a gaming company can be difficult, though Bioware is one of the best in the industry. I think my decision was to stick with a quality, stable job and having game making be a hobby. For the most part, it's lower stress and I can take the story whatever direction I want.
In terms of the winning module from last year, I actually did two versions. The first was way too linear. The second had lots of choice, from evil to crazy to several flavors of good. There was drama and humor, quality scripting, and polished writing. For folks trying for this contest, I'd keep the cutscenes short, give the player as many choices as you can manage, and make your NPCs memorable. Less is more for these sorts of things. Don't plan an epic module spanning dozens of areas. Just make a couple, with a simple storyline. Play to your strengths - writers should write and scripters should script. You'll have to do both, but emphasize what you're best at.
I think it's pretty obvious that downloaded shows make a lot of sense at the moment. So do DVDs of shows - it's convenient and you can use them offline.
Imagine a future, though, where wireless broadband is cheap and ubiquitous. Subscription websites generally do poorly and people are willing to sit through advertising in order to get something they want for free. If I can tab to another web site during commercials, I probably don't care that things are delayed for a couple minutes.
Eventually, the issue will be about time. Some people's time is valuable enough that they'll purchase the DVD or download the series. For the masses, the commercial approach is fine for them. Personally, I think it's good to have choices.
When looking at their example on how to "best" format text for comprehension, I was amazed at how much space it took up. Clearly a cabal of paper and timber industries are behind this study, hoping to produce widely space-inefficient books.
To add insult to injury, I found the new version to look like evil dada poetry, essentially incomprehensible. The bright red bold words made my brain hurt even more.
I strangely had a dream about this game last night. It was a bit surreal and difficult to explain.
On a more serious note, I'm excited to see the creator of one of my favorite adventure games playing a role in the creation of this game. My only regret is that I probably can't let my eight year-old play it. Trying to explain why masturbating fruit fuckers are funny would probably challenge my parenting skills more than they can handle.
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If the auction grants exclusive rights, that means other businesses can't develop the spectrum even further. Sure, the consumers get extra gizmos, but it'll be other businesses that are making those gizmos to sell.
Still, it does suggest a shift away from monopoly business practices and more towards competitive business practices. I did read that Republican money-raising efforts are floundering, so perhaps it's a way to either shake down the AT&Ts of the world, or get money from smaller businesses.
It's a good thing I'm not that cynical.
The cellular targets on bacteria are very different than those for mammals. It's uncommon for viriuses to jump species. It's even more rare to jump to another phylum. Jumping kingdoms is practically miraculous.
The FDA has already approved bacteriophages to be used in a variety of settings, so there's probably a pretty good safety record.
A lot of things could contribute to the trends. We're becoming increasingly international, which is odd, mostly because we host some really good general health information. Over the years we've gotten some really odd traffic spikes from Google as they tweak their search algorithms. Even though we only serve the Pacific Northwest, we get lots of overseas traffic.
My coworker remarked today that Linux jumped from 3% to 6% in the weblogs this month. Now, odds are something else is going on, but it's an interesting little statistic. We often ponder our weblog statistics, seeing clear trends in OS's and browsers.
Doesn't this violate various anti-spyware laws? For example, here's Illinois' law:
Creates the Consumer Protection Against Computer Spyware Act. Sets forth provisions for unauthorized collection or culling of personally identifiable information, unauthorized access to or modifications of computer settings and computer damage, unauthorized interference with installation or disabling computer software, and other prohibited conduct. Provides that certain persons may bring a civil action against a violator of the Act. Exempts willful and wanton misconduct from the limitation on liability.
This is a cure for death, unless I'm badly mistaken.
Well, it is a cure for death. Of course, all your cells will turn cancerous and you'll need to live in a vat full of nutrients. You'll potentially live forever, though I'm not sure I'd wish that sort of immortality on my worst enemy.
Think of this as an initial proof-of-concept. Fiddling with DNA is extremely useful - correcting genetic diseases and curing all sorts of viruses that hang out in your cells comes to mind (e.g. herpes). You could even look at curing cancer, since that's typically due to genetic mutations that could be potentially removed, making cells non-cancerous again.
Eventually, you'll want to be able to recognize and remove longer strands of DNA. I'd also worry about the efficiency - randomly removing strands of DNA from healthy cells is a good way to cause big problems. Existing gene therapies that use viruses to deliver the payload sometimes go astray and cause cancer, which is no good.
The autism they are dealing with is from hanging 'x' syndrome all you need to do is find a female who is trait positive (has on malformed x) and breed her.
I keep trying to breed with a trait positive female mouse, but after a few drinks all she wants to do is run around on her wheel. What am I doing wrong?
It is not technology, nor money, he said, the pacing ingredient is marshaled will.
Obviously this "Marshaled will" stuff must be the key ingredient that he's discovered. Just a pinch of that and planets magically become habitable.
Air horn.
The catch, of course, is that all this animation comes at a pretty huge cost in time. It takes teams of animators countless hours to generate all that animation.
I keep thinking that procedural animation is going to be the next big thing. Instead of rigid animations, we'll see rules governing the position of each limb and how they interact with the world and other characters. It's expensive in terms of CPU processing power, but it allows for a far more natural interaction with the environment. There's a movie of the new Indiana Jones game that shows this off nicely.
My dream, as a hobbyist game developer, is to have animation and text to voice systems get to the point where I can do a lot of the work myself. As it is, coordinating voice actors and model animation takes a huge chunk of time.
Ironically, just a few weeks ago our Google Search Appliance lost two drives in a few days (resulting in a new server being shipped to us after some hassle with customer service). One theory is that the drives don't handle losing power very well (we had a power outage). My guess is that under ideal conditions, the failure rates are about the same. When things go wrong (e.g. hotter than normal, power issues, etc), perhaps the SAS drives have an advantage.
For starters, our SAN uses extremely fast connectivity. It sounds like you're moving your disk I/O over the network, which is a fairly significant bottleneck (even Gb). We also have the flexibility of multiple tiers - 1st tier being expensive, fast disks, and 2nd tier being cheaper IDE drives. I imagine you can fake that a variety of ways, but it's built in. Finally, there's the enclosure itself, with redundant power and such.
Still, I bet you could do what you want on the cheap. Being in health care, response time and availability really are life-and-death, but many other industries don't need to spend the extra. Best of luck.
People talk about the brain being this lovely, elaborate machine. In reality, it's a mass of chemical signals and nerves that were selected over millions of years by evolutionary pressures. Yes, there may be some parts of the brain that trigger pleasurable feelings when giving to others. There's also clearly parts of the brain that trigger pleasurable feelings when taking things from others.
Your mind is really a collection of competing and cooperating neurons and signaling mechanisms. Complex concepts like "altruism" get generated by billions of nerve cells doing their thing. It's a classic example of emergent behavior.
Well, my SSN is in lots of databases, so I don't worry about that too much. It isn't public, though, mostly because various institutions use SSN like a password (which I feel is crazy). The ideal from a "proof of identity" standpoint is to have a public identifier and some mechanism to prove that's who you are. Now, I wouldn't care about the proof aspect for most things. I'd just want a number to check against to see if person X is the same as entry Y. If it's just "John Smith", that's useless.
I wouldn't mind having some unique identifier in some database somewhere. The main risk people mention is that it makes it difficult to "clear your name" (or number in this case) once the government sticks you on a list. Currently, though, the matching is so inaccurate that innocent people end up paying for the crimes of others.
When we bought our house, our escrow company checked several variations of the owner's name. It turns out there was an unusual one and sure enough, there were liens against him from a previous court judgment. Soon ensued a wacky setup where the person selling the house didn't want to formally sell it until he could settle with the previous party (presumably for less money). We ended up living in our house for months without having clear title to the place.
Though we didn't try the guy at all, our escrow guys were great, holding on to the cash necessary to pay off the loan and guaranteeing that we'd get the title by a certain date. When buying a house, most people think the money going to the escrow folks is just for show, but in this case they really earned their keep.
It's funny that it required them to check odd name variations to find out the house wasn't really his to sell. If everyone had unique numbers and judgments and such were recorded under those numbers, it would be far more difficult to hide from your responsibilities.
There's a variety of "no work" databases out there. As a healthcare organization, we're required to check them or else we'll lose our Medicare status. For example, there's one that lists people who have been convicted of fraud. If we employ them, we could lose our Medicare reimbursement.
From a database perspective, the problem is making some automated process to make this work. Most lists I've seen don't have SSN, so you have to do crazy name matches. Of course, people convicted of fraud always use their real name, right?
Putting civil liberties aside, from a straight technical standpoint it would be great if everyone had a unique identifier and people would give lists that have these unique identifiers. I realize people have heart attacks over SSN, but there's nothing else out there at the moment (and it drives me nuts when banks use knowing SSN as proof-of-identity).
I'm not advocating we switch to some "everyone gets a number" society, but it's equally silly to pass laws requiring us to check lists of names and not expect it to be wildly inaccurate.
The most troublesome part is that it was Smithsonian's administration that wanted the changes, not people from the US administration.
There's two kinds of people: those that change their beliefs to fit the facts and those that change the facts to fit their beliefs.
When you're changing the facts to fit other people's beliefs, well, I guess you get the budget dollars but lose all self-respect.
They got it all wrong. The problem isn't with WiFi, the problem is when the signal carries the kill bit, passing through your body and causing extreme cellular damage. That's why most of the time the studies show up nothing.
Learning the NWN toolset, if you have no programming experience, can be daunting. It sounds like your background is ideally suited to 3D modeling, if that's of interest to you. That being said, if you're interested there are many tutorials to choose from.
Best of luck.
In a more recent study, it seemed to help deter crime. A review (Welsh & Farrington 2006) of high quality evaluations of the effectiveness of CCTV as a crime prevention measure concluded that there was an overall eight percent reduction in crime in the experimental areas where CCTV was installed compared with a nine percent increase in crime in the control areas. The review included evaluations of 19 sites in the UK and the USA. Other findings from this meta-analysis concluded that CCTV interventions were more successful in car parks than in other settings such as city centres or housing estates, and that CCTV interventions were generally more successful in the UK than in the USA.
A year or two ago I participated in Bioware's writing contest, winning the community voting. I actually did it for the swag they were giving away - I use their coffee mug every day and that Bioware wool cap kept me warm all winter. They'd already offered me a job some time ago, mostly after my NWN modules came out. It was extremely flattering, though the move, disruption to my family, and pay cut made the decision pretty easy. I have a great job in healthcare and a somehow find the time to continue to work on my module building even still. Working for a gaming company can be difficult, though Bioware is one of the best in the industry. I think my decision was to stick with a quality, stable job and having game making be a hobby. For the most part, it's lower stress and I can take the story whatever direction I want.
In terms of the winning module from last year, I actually did two versions. The first was way too linear. The second had lots of choice, from evil to crazy to several flavors of good. There was drama and humor, quality scripting, and polished writing. For folks trying for this contest, I'd keep the cutscenes short, give the player as many choices as you can manage, and make your NPCs memorable. Less is more for these sorts of things. Don't plan an epic module spanning dozens of areas. Just make a couple, with a simple storyline. Play to your strengths - writers should write and scripters should script. You'll have to do both, but emphasize what you're best at.
I think it's pretty obvious that downloaded shows make a lot of sense at the moment. So do DVDs of shows - it's convenient and you can use them offline.
Imagine a future, though, where wireless broadband is cheap and ubiquitous. Subscription websites generally do poorly and people are willing to sit through advertising in order to get something they want for free. If I can tab to another web site during commercials, I probably don't care that things are delayed for a couple minutes.
Eventually, the issue will be about time. Some people's time is valuable enough that they'll purchase the DVD or download the series. For the masses, the commercial approach is fine for them. Personally, I think it's good to have choices.
When looking at their example on how to "best" format text for comprehension, I was amazed at how much space it took up. Clearly a cabal of paper and timber industries are behind this study, hoping to produce widely space-inefficient books.
To add insult to injury, I found the new version to look like evil dada poetry, essentially incomprehensible. The bright red bold words made my brain hurt even more.
I strangely had a dream about this game last night. It was a bit surreal and difficult to explain.
On a more serious note, I'm excited to see the creator of one of my favorite adventure games playing a role in the creation of this game. My only regret is that I probably can't let my eight year-old play it. Trying to explain why masturbating fruit fuckers are funny would probably challenge my parenting skills more than they can handle.